In Memoriam: Elizabeth Taylor

I’m saddened to learn that Elizabeth Taylor has died, shocked to note that she was seventy-nine. Was she only eighteen when she appeared in Vincente Minnelli’s “Father of the Bride,” nineteen in “A Place in the Sun,” and twenty-six for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”? She grew up too fast (she was already a star in “National Velvet,” at twelve), lived too much too soon, and was a victim of tabloid sensationalism and of changing times, in the movie business and in the world. She was a jazz-forged performer in an industry whose norms and ways were falling before the new styles of the almighty teen; she was a hot performer, one of the most ferociously intense, in an era that turned McLuhan-esque cool; she needed Douglas Sirk to transfigure the melodramatic excesses from camp into symbol, but he left Hollywood in 1959. She shared the fate of premature obsolescence with many of the great jazz musicians of her time.

Ezra Goodman, in his superb collection “The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood,” charts in detail the fan-magazine smears that Taylor endured after Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds and married her, in 1959. (Reynolds was a teen favorite.) The invective rivals any that could be found in today’s on-line snark-fests. Here’s Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed her twice (in “Suddenly, Last Summer” and, of course, “Cleopatra”), interviewed by Gary Carey in 1972 (it’s in a book of interviews with Mankiewicz edited by Brian Dauth):

For a while, her personal tribulations seemed to have become interwoven with her work; how could they not have? When all at once her public image ceased being that of an actress—and became, instead, a sitting-duck target with unlimited free shots for all comers?

Was she born too late—or too soon for the age of unbounded convergence between media image and screen persona, the age we’re living in now?

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